Alpine revival labor of love for West Texas woman

1of 8Betty Gaddis-Yndo is reluctant to take credit for Murphy Street's revival in the West Texas town of Alpine, but her purchase of several old buildings on the street was the catalyst for growth.Photo: Marshal Gaddis

2of 8The Murphy St. Raspa Co. was for many years a grocery store and meat market.Photo: Joe Holley, Joe Holley/Houston Chronicle

ALPINE - On Murphy Street this week cowboys, construction workers and Big Bend spring-breakers crowded into El Patio for crispy tacos and enchiladas. Next door, kids with strawberry-stained lips horsed around outside the Murphy Street Raspa Co., and art aficionados wandered into local artist Tom Curry's unusual igloo-shaped gallery. On a sunny day in the clear mountain air, it was obvious that Murphy Street, after years of decline, is coming back to life, thanks in large part to an 86-year-old woman who loves Alpine and saw potential a few years ago in three blocks of run-down, mostly abandoned buildings steeped in West Texas history.

Had you gotten off the train here a hundred years ago, most likely you would have strolled over to Front Street into the heart of the business district. Across the tracks in the opposite direction was Murphy Street, the Mexican main street in a community unofficially known as Southside. Until just a few decades ago, the demarcation between south and north was as rigid as the railroad tracks, as unyielding as the black/white color line in a typical Southern town at the height of Jim Crow. Fortunately, the tracks these days are merely an inconvenience when Amtrak's Sunset Limited blocks traffic on a couple of cross streets during its brief stop in this pleasant little ranching and college town.

The railroad is the reason for Alpine's existence. The town was established in 1882 to coincide with the arrival of the Southern Pacific-Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway. It was originally called Murphysville, but after becoming the county seat of Brewster County in 1887, townspeople decided to change its name to something less prosaic.

Southside came about when the families of Mexican workers laying track pitched tents on the south side and then replaced the tents with adobe houses. "The tracks did not prevent Anglos from settling in Southside but were an impermeable barrier that kept non-Anglos from moving to Northside," geographer and sociologist Paul Wright of Sul Ross State University has written.

In his research, Wright found that only one non-Anglo, a former buffalo soldier who had been stationed at nearby Fort Davis, ever owned property on the north side of the tracks in the years near the turn of the century. He had a downtown bakery and house. In Southside, though, Anglos owned most of the property on Murphy Street, as well as most of the residential property where Mexicans lived.

That's not ancient history for Lazaro "Pete" Valenzuela, 77, an Alpine native who's lived in Honolulu the past 31 years. "You didn't cross the tracks," he recalled, "and if you wanted to go to the movie theater over there, you had to sit in the balcony."

A division street

Schools were segregated, his sister, Lucila Valenzuela, 76, told me as we stood on the sidewalk outside the Murphy Street house where her 95-year-old mother has lived since 1950. Southside children attended either the Catholic school on their side of town or Centennial School, the Mexican public school that integrated in 1969, 15 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

When the Valenzuelas and their Southside neighbors crossed the tracks, they carried U.S. government letters showing they were citizens. Lucila Valuenzuela's parents had to get permission from a county judge for her to attend high school on the north side. After graduating from Sul Ross, she taught English for 31 years in Pecos.

"This was a very segregated town," said Nancy Davila, who runs Brown Dog Gardens on Murphy Street in an open-air structure that used to be a stable. "To this day there are people who have lived on the north side who have never been on the south."

"Hispanics were discouraged from going over there," said B.J. Gallego, an amateur historian who writes articles for "Nuestra Historia," a publication of Sul Ross's Center for Big Bend Studies. The word "discouraged" brought a wry smile to his face.

The soft-spoken former social worker has written about a mutual-aid society that Hispanic elders in Southside established in 1908. Called Amor al Trabajo y Union, it was one of several set up to assist families during times of need and to help them cope with the everyday burdens of prejudice, segregation and language limitations in a small West Texas town.

That community self-sufficiency also nurtured a thriving business district along Murphy Street - a grocery store and meat market, a barbershop, a couple of cafes, a photography studio, an ice house, a dry cleaner, a cabinet maker. Murphy Street also was home to the infamous Toltec Bar, where bootleg whiskey was brewed in the basement and, in later years, where airmen from the nearby base at Marfa drank alongside Sul Ross students, including a young Dan Blocker (Hoss Cartwright of "Bonanza" fame.)

The Valenzuelas and Gallego remember those days; they also remember Murphy Street's slow demise. Not unlike what happened in once-segregated towns and cities across the South, the old people died, their children moved away and the rigid lines of demarcation blurred. Southside didn't need Murphy Street anymore.

Betty Gaddis-Yndo, whose late husband ran a small hospital in Fort Davis many years ago, fell in love with Alpine in the early 1960s, particularly after she discovered that it's home to more adobe structures than any town between San Antonio and El Paso. These days she divides her time between Alpine, San Antonio and Ojai, Calif., but it's Alpine that gets most of her attention.

In 2007, she bought the dilapidated building that for years had housed Valadez Market, Southside's grocery store and unofficial community center. The old place was vacant, but, as Gaddis-Yndo recalls, "it was full of neighborhood memories." The owner insisted she buy three more falling-down buildings next door. Her purchase was the catalyst for Murphy Street's revival.

Still nurturing

Today the old two-story Valadez Market building is home to Murphy Street Raspa Co., after-school headquarters for kids with a yen for snow cones or ice cream. Along the street are art galleries and studios, a bed-and-breakfast, two Mexican restaurants, Davila's garden and gift shop - 13 businesses in all, where before Gaddis-Yndo's purchases there were two. Meanwhile, a number of Southside's venerable adobe houses are being renovated.

Gaddis-Yndo, elegant, white-haired and strong-willed, is reluctant to take credit for Murphy Street's revival, but she's not through with her nurturing. She's working to lure more businesses - local businesses, she emphasizes - to what she calls "the prettiest part of town."

Native Texan Joe Holley is a former editorial page editor and columnist for newspapers in San Antonio and San Diego and a staff writer for The Washington Post. He has been a regular contributor to Texas Monthly and Columbia Journalism Review and is the author of two books, including a biography of football hero, Slingin' Sammy Baugh. He joined the Houston Chronicle in 2009.